The Today programme's John Humphrys has been hit with a backlash for repeatedly grilling Rupert Everett on his sexuality, before bemusedly asking the actor why the topic is always brought up.

While interviewing Everett on Radio 4 this morning about his Oscar Wilde biopic The Happy Prince, Humphrys asked the actor: "You came out as gay, what, nearly 30 years ago – do you ever regret that or was it the right timing? I mean, what effect has it had on you, on your career?"

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Everett, who came out in the mid-1970s, said: "I don't regret it, it wasn't really a choice for me. I was very into the whole scene of being gay... it wasn't really a possibility for me to have lived a kind of double life.

"But in terms of regret in terms of career, yes of course. To be gay in a quite aggressively hetrosexual business, a kind of boys' club, is certainly not ideal."

Everett said that being gay had been something which the film industry held against him, and that "at a certain point [you] kind of hit a brick wall".

It was at roughly this point that Twitter decided it wasn't having any of it.

Rupert Everett appears on @BBCr4today to discuss his new film. John Humphrys relentlessly grills Everett about being gay, and then ends the interview with “Do you think there will ever come a time when you can do an interview and being gay doesn’t even come up?” The year is 2018.

John Humphreys just spent a whole interview with Rupert Everett hounding him about being gay on @BBCr4today ... total dinosaur! I remember a time when old people retired ... allowing the next generation to get on with making a world relevant to the future, not the past.

Having made Everett's sexuality the main theme of the interview, Humphrys rounded off by asking: "Do you ever think that it'll ever get to the stage where we'll do an interview like this and it won't even be mentioned that you happen to be gay?"

Everett said it "would be great if that happened".

"For me to be so defined by gayness wasn't necessarily a help for an acting career," he went on to say.

If only someone, somewhere, had the power to just not ask those questions.